KYOTO, Japan. The 2021 Summer Olympics are underway 280 miles away, but in this city of 1.5 million another sort of games are underway at a seedy resort motel with an outdoor pool, a sharp contrast to the Tokyo Aquatics Center in which divers compete before empty seats. “A lot of people think we’re bitter,” says Mark Wertz of Knob Noster, Missouri, with an edge in his voice. “For once, a lot of people are right.”
Wertz is a world-class pool jumper, a sport looked down on by competitive divers as undignified, but Wertz says they’re just snobs. “Fancy-pants divers think it’s cool to enter the water without making a splash, ” Wertz says, shaking his head. “That’s the whole point!”
As he says these last words, Anton Scher of Finland walks to the edge of the 10-meter board, bounces, flies high in the air and then enters the water clumsily, making a splash big enough to put him out of contention in most diving competitions.
Can opener
“Nice,” Wertz says with a nod of his head as Scher climbs out of the pool. “You got a lot of volume on your splash.”
The young men and women assembled here from many nations started their own “Alt-Olympics” when the International Olympic Committee refused, as they have since the first games in 776 B.C., to recognize pool jumping as a legitimate sport. “The end of life is the pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful,” said Aristotle, a commentator at the 334 B.C. games. “I don’t know how you can call a jump that looks like a fall from a burning building ‘beautiful.’”
Competitors must perform five classic jumps–cannonball, can opener, preacher’s seat, suicide and “back splat”–into a pool ringed by a panel of international judges. “I coulda been a diver,” says Tony DiStafano, an earnest sixteen-year-old from Italy, “but I like to make a splash.”
“You want to lean back into it a little more.”
Because many of the compulsory pool jumps are American creations, the U.S. team is expected to have a built-in edge if the sport advances beyond the “demonstration” stage, but Wertz is leaving nothing to chance. “I don’t buy that for a minute,” says Wertz. “The Eastern European women are the dark horse with all that hair on their upper lips.”